Researching Talaat Pasha

Born in Kırcaali (Kardzhali), Adrianople (Edirne) Vilayet, Mehmed Talaat grew up to despise Sultan Abdul Hamid II's autocracy. He was an early member of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), a secret revolutionary Young Turk organization, and over time became its leader. After the CUP succeeded in restoring the constitution and parliament in the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, Talaat was elected as a deputy from Adrianople (Edirne) to the Chamber of Deputies and later became Minister of the Interior. Talaat played an important role in the downfall of Abdul Hamid the next year during the 31 March Incident by organizing a counter government. Multiple crisis in the Empire including the 31 March Incident, attacks on Rumelian Muslims in the Balkan Wars, and the power struggle with the Freedom and Accord Party made Talaat and the Unionists disillusioned with multicultural Ottomanism and political pluralism, turning them into hard-line authoritarian Turkish nationalists.

After the 1913 coup and Mahmud Şevket Pasha's assassination, the Ottoman Empire was ruled by the Union and Progress in a one-party dictatorship, whose leaders were the triumvirate of Talaat, İsmail Enver, and Ahmed Cemal (known as the Three Pashas), of whom Talaat was its civilian leader and politically most powerful. Talaat and Enver Pasha were influential bringing the Ottoman Empire into the First World War. During World War I, Talaat ordered on 24 April 1915 the arrest and deportation of Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople (now Istanbul), most of them being ultimately murdered, and on 30 May 1915 requested the Temporary Law of Deportation; these events initiated the Armenian genocide. He is widely considered the main perpetrator of the genocide, and is thus held responsible for the death of around 1 million Armenians.

In a move that established total Unionist control over the Ottoman government, Talaat Pasha became Grand Vizier (Prime Minister) in 1917. His premiership saw the introduction of many modernization reforms, which Mustafa Kemal Atatürk would later build upon. Talaat personally negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Bolsheviks, regaining parts of Eastern Anatolia which were occupied by Russia since 1878, and won the race to Baku on the Caucusus front. However breakthroughs by the Allies in the Macedonia and Palestine front meant defeat for the Ottomans and the downfall of the CUP. On the night of 2–3 November 1918, Talaat Pasha and other members of the CUP's central committee fled the Ottoman Empire (Talaat ended up in Berlin, Germany). The Ottoman Special Military Tribunal convicted Talaat and sentenced him to death in absentia for subverting the constitution, profiteering from the war, and organizing massacres against Greeks and Armenians. In exile, he supported the Turkish Nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal in Turkey's War of Independence. Talaat was assassinated in Berlin in 1921 by Soghomon Tehlirian, a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, as part of Operation Nemesis.